How additional licensing costs may affect your IT budget in 2019

by GLiNTECH

How additional licensing costs may affect your IT budget in 2019

Are your Atlassian tools ready?

What is happening?

Oracle have changed how they licence their Java products and will from Jan 2019 they will be charging for licences to their Long-Term-Support (LTS) versions of Java. These LTS versions of Java are the ones that used to come bundled with Atlassian Server and Data Centre products like Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket (see table below).

How does this affect me?

Atlassian products all require Java (a programming language) in order to work. If you installed Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket (Server or Data Centre) before January 2019, it came bundled with Oracle JDK 8. To continue using Oracle Java with updates and security patches, you will need to pay for an Oracle subscription. This is in addition to any Atlassian licencing costs.

What are my options?

You have three main options:

1. Stay on your the old version of Oracle Java

You can continue running on Oracle JDK 8 without a subscription, but it will leave you vulnerable to any Java security issues that are identified after January 2019.

This version will also be unsupported by future versions of Atlassian products, meaning you won't be able to upgrade your Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket for new features, security patches, etc.

2. Purchase an Oracle Java subscription

If you want to continue to get updates and security patches beyond January 2019, you'll need to purchase an Oracle Java SE subscription. Check out this Oracle post for more.

3. Upgrade your Atlassian tools to a version that supports OpenJDK

Each Atlassian Server and Data Center product now has a feature version which supports OpenJDK and will continue doing so. This is a free, open-source version of Java that can be used instead of the paid Oracle one.

By upgrading your Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket tools to the required version, you can start using OpenJDK and avoid both additional subscription costs or security vulnerabilities.

This is the recommended approach.

Example Scenario

Oracle's subscription model will charge you $25USD/processor per month.

If you're running a production and non-production Jira Server and Confluence Server, each with quad cores, and you decide to continue with Oracle LTS Java, you would incur the following costs: